


Snowfall

by flollius



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Family Feels, Height difference, Interspecies Relationship, Prompt Fill, That sweet height difference, Thror would have a heart attack if he knew, and cultural differences too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 11:35:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1132160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flollius/pseuds/flollius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alone on the fringes of Dunland in the search for his long-lost father, Thorin is caught in the grasp of an early winter and resigns himself to passing the season in the home of a widow, who really has no need for a man beneath her roof. What happens next makes Thorin question everything that he's ever known.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snowfall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bending_sickle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bending_sickle/gifts).



> Prompt: Thorin/human woman (preferably not one-night-stand, with cultural, age, and/or life-expectancy differences explored)
> 
> (super thanks to bending_sickle for the prompt this was just too enjoyable to write actually)  
> -
> 
> I honestly didn't expect this to go on as long as it did - but what was a drabble just turned into 3500 words because writing Thorin as a little puppy in love is just too much fun ok. 
> 
> Hope you all enjoy - I guess I could have made Thorin a little more... Thorin-ish, but hey the guy needs a bit of a break sometimes.

He wonders for a long time what his grandfather would say. 

It’s a guilty thought, reserved for that moment of quiet when the deed is done, and they still lie tangled together, breathing and sweating and hearts pounding madly in twin ribcages. He can’t stop it from happening. Thorin knows that what he’s doing is wrong, so very wrong, and when he looks across and sees her brows knit together and eyes wander, he sees that she knows it’s wrong, too.

Asha is strong, stronger than any dam Thorin has met with the rare exception of his sister. Her hands are red-raw and callused at the palm, there are lines around her eyes and her hair has faded to straw-stiffness. She was beautiful once, she whispers with soft regret. 

“You still are.” He kisses her throat, but she doesn’t believe him. 

-

It begins so innocently. Thorin, attempting to return through the mountain-range from Dunland and towards the west after a fruitless search for his father, is cornered by an early, bitter winter. Slicked with ice and never emerging from freezing, he knows he is defeated. 

He doorknocks at the small village nestled in the foothills. He has no money left, no goods to trade, but he has the skill of his hands. He can work, better than any. He can cast a blade and forge breastplate better than any in this town. But there is no need for skilled blacksmithing in this cluster of thatched hovels. He offers his aid in construction, but who builds a thing over winter? They are insular and distrusting and Thorin is an outsider.

Asha spies him after he was turned away at the doorstep of her neighbour. She listens carefully, mulling the thought over in her head. 

“Master dwarf,” She stands in the dirt lane, with a basket pressed against her hip. Thorin freezes and turned slowly. “Are you in need of shelter this winter?”

There is a curl of his lip, and the embers of his eyes breathe in new life. He merely nods. 

“My husband died a few years ago from the fever.” The olive branch stretches out between them across the dirt. “I could do with a pair of hands to help around the house for a little while. I can’t pay you, but I’ll put a roof over your head and give you all the food you need.”

-

He doesn’t smile for two weeks. He is downcast and quiet, and brooding in his quietness. The children are _fascinated_ by this strange creature. Her eldest, Elstan, is almost as tall as him already and he’s only nine years old. Martha simply stares up from the floor with wide eyes, clutching her teddy in silence. 

But he fixes the thin spots in her thatch and puts a new wheel on her barrow and stops the gate from popping open and soon she is inventing tasks for him. They're things she could do herself, and he looks at her hands and knows that she can do them, but Thorin isn't insulted. He's terrified of idleness, and the thoughts they bring. 

-

He doesn’t know what to expect in the first few days. He hasn’t spoken to a woman before, not beyond a few simple pleasantries. He remembers the ladies of Dale, draped in silk and gold and velvet. They flitted and twittered and reminded Thorin of colourful birds. Beautiful yes, but ultimately empty and insignificant.

But Asha is brown and weathered. Her cottage is one-roomed and smoky, with two alcoves in the back. The ceiling is strung with smoked meat and onions and cheese-curds. She knotted the rug herself, collecting old rags over a series of years. She has nothing but the skill if her hands, this widow, and she makes the best of it. It's astonishing to see.

He unfurls, slowly. He talks about his sister, his nephews, his home. She listens with her hands buried in knitting or darning. She doesn’t stop - she’s never still, not for a moment. Too much to do, she always says, with a smile in the corner of her mouth. 

Thorin knows what love is. He had a dam promised to him, a stout, healthy thing of forty with a ruddy face and buxom figure. But she vanished in the smoke, along with his name. Thorin remembers kissing her hand and whispering fragments of poetry to her. He remembers the gleam of her teeth as she smiled.

Asha is none of those things. She’s tall, tall even for a woman, and lean and hard and browned from the sun. Her hair is a simple thick braid that trails to her waist and the bones stick out at wrist and elbow but there is a rough-hewn beauty about her that keeps Thorin awake at night.

-

He cuts the wood in the little yard behind her cottage. There’s a fine pig lazing in the mud, fat and pregnant, four chickens pecking about for seeds and grain, and a goat chewing on a clump of thistles. Elstan has taken Martha down to the creek to fish for eels. It’s a clear, fine morning and although the breath fogs from his mouth he’s sweating inside his tunic. He stops to pull it over his head and continues in his work, chips flying through the air.

“Hold on Peggy, I’ve got an- _oh.”_ Thorin turns to see Asha on the back doorstep. There are two spots of pink on her brown cheeks. He hasn’t seen her taken aback like this. 

“Almost done.” With a swagger, he rests the axe-handle on his shoulder and digs a thumb into the waistband of his trousers. He feels ridiculous, posturing like this. It’s the sort of acts reserved for drunk men who don’t know better. What would Thror say, if he saw this? He doesn’t know why he’s doing this. But he can’t stop.

But the colour deepens in her brown face, and she walks towards the pig with her head bowed. The wooden pail bounces against her thigh, half-filled with muddy potato-peelings and eggshells and brown-edged spinach leaves. She won’t look at him, she keeps her face angled away, but Thorin can still see Asha is biting her lip.

-

“Tell me about him.” He talks silently, after the children are asleep. They sit at the table, side by side. He studies her face. Asha keeps her eyes on the sock she’s darning. “Your husband. You’ve barely spoke a word of him.”

She sighs. “He was a brute, really.” Her bony fingers are as quick as ever. “Too thick for anything clever. He just dug ditches and split rocks. Whatever work he could take. Then he drank most of his coin.” Thorin stares at the downward pull of his mouth. He feels stupid and clumsy and doesn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry.” Without knowing what else to do, he reaches out and takes her hand and the darning grinds to a stop. “You deserve better than that, Asha.” 

She can’t speak. She simply stares down at their clasped hands. Her lip is trembling and her shoulders are moving very quickly in short gasps. 

It’s a mutual kiss. They both look up, both lean in. They both open their mouths and run their hands through each other’s hair. Thorin tries to pull her into his arms but she won’t move. Instead, she holds him. He’s thick and heavy but with her long limbs and steady, quiet strength, she can easily bear his weight. She dips her head to kiss him, fingertips running over his beard, his jaw, through his long curls. He can’t stop touching the hollows in her neck, the bones along her shoulders and the little cleft underneath her ear.  

It should be humiliating, crouched in the arms of someone bigger than him. But Thorin feels no shame in it. He thought she would feel thin and frail in his arms, but she is as fine and light as mithril, with that same intrinsic strength. He breaks apart as his lungs burn, feet stretching out to find the floor, pulling at her bony wrists. 

He stretches her out before the fire and takes her, or she takes him, it’s not clear. It doesn’t matter. 

-

He should feel humilated. He has desecrated the honour of his ancestors, with what he has done. But the next day, Thorin perches on the doorstep sharpening his knife with a small whetstone, and he feels nothing but warmth and pleasure. 

Asha pushes past him to feed the chickens and he lowers his hands. He watches the curve of her weathered back as she scatters handfuls of corn and coarse grain. The sun is behind her, illuminating sparks of chestnut-brown hair. It looks as though she wears a crown of gold. 

She turns back to look at him and smiles, with her apron dirty and worn through to holes, the chickens scratching and pecking at her feet.

-

Three days after their first encounter, Asha washes before the fire. She heats up several pails of water and empties it all into the wash-basin. Thorin sits on the edge of his seat and pretends to busy himself with his pipe. But he catches glimpses of her. Asha undresses and kneels naked on the floor. Her soap is coarse and greasy but it makes the grey dirt run in rivulets. She doesn’t have any scented oils to put in her hair, only white vinegar, and it strips the hair down to straw and makes the room smell. Thorin spies on her ritual with his legs pushed close together, watching the gleam of the fire on her naked limbs. The drops shine like tiny gems. 

“Let me.” His voice is hoarse as she starts to drag the comb through her hair. She stops to stare at him, with that look she sometimes wears with a crease between her thick, dark brows. But she hands it over to him, carved with leaves along the spine and fine bone teeth.

The hair flows like water through his splayed fingers. Asha sits and Thorin kneels behind her, resting on the balls of his feet. When he is done, and the teeth rake through the damp locks with ease, he traces lines over her scalp. 

“May I braid it?” There’s a trembling reverence in his voice, one he knows she will not understand. She bobs her head in a nod, closing her eyes as his skilled hands go to work, sectioning and twisting and curling and plaiting. Thorin’s hands tremble at first; he’s never done this to anyone, only his sister. He’s never braided another female and to do it now, to a peasant woman, it leaves a balloon of panic pushing at his throat. This is more sacrilegious than the lovemaking to Thorin. This is a betrayal of his people.

She runs her hands over the artful braids when he has done, smiling. “I’ve never worn braids so fine.” Asha declares, looking over her shoulder to beam at him. The firelight gleams in her dark eyes. 

-

“I don’t even know how old you are.” They lie together, bundled up in Asha’s narrow bed and whispering, lest the children in the next room wake. The woman lies on her side, curled in a little, and Thorin is pressed against her, on his back. His head is below hers on the pillow, and if he moves his feet he can brush her knees. She runs a hand over his chest, absentmindedly feeling the scars beneath the low forest of hair. 

“A hundred and sixty.” His soft admission makes her hands still. “Not too old.”

“And yet you never...”

“No.” Thorin kisses her brow. “Not until I saw your face.”

She smiles, looking so very sad as she does it. “I’m thirty-six. I’ve got twenty years left if I’m lucky. Something tells me you’ll outlive me by a long, long time.”

“I’m not so sure.” Thorin breathes into the shell of her ear. “I feel old, Asha. So very, very old.” And there’s a weight inside of him, a stone heart that keeps him close to the ground. 

-

It’s midwinter. There’s a heavy snowfall, and gusts of wind rattle the door. The pig lazes against the wall, bringing in a deep, animal odor that Asha knows she won’t get out of the floorboards for a long time. The chickens have nestled in a wood-box beneath the table, but they’re stirring and restless and won’t lay that night. 

“We haven’t had a snowfall like this for years.” She murmurs into his ear. And despite the hearth, the heavy blankets around the both of them, the press of flushed naked skin against skin, Thorin feels a shiver course through his body. 

It’s a warning from the Makers.

-

It has to stop. It _must_ stop. And yet, there is a breaking inside of Thorin with the mere though of parting from her. He lives in borrowed time - a hundred years or more he may have let to wander this earth, but there is only another month until the frost thaws and the crocus-buds push impatiently through the snow. He will have no reason to stay, then.

“If I could, I would wrap you in gold and velvet.” He murmurs sleepily one morning, watching her dress. Thorin lies on his back, with his head pillowed on one arm and the blankets slung about his waist. Asha pauses in her ragged shift, her hair coming out from the braid he wove in her dark hair the night before. 

“You are ridiculous.” She throws a sock at him, a smile breaking on her face. 

“I would.” Her limbs are so long. She could pick him up and sling him over one shoulder as though he was a sack of grain. “And I would drape you with jewels, until you couldn’t lift your arms beneath the weight.” Thorin trails off in his gilded fantasy. “Everywhere you walked, your feel would fall on a carpet of roses. You would bathe in milk and drink from goblets of gold and the world would fall at your feet.”

“Ha.” Asha bends down to kiss his face. “You don’t have the money for _that_ Thorin.”

He smiles, sadly. “I did.”

-

Thorin sits with his knees drawn up, cheek pressed against the doorframe. A weak, watery sun hangs in the white sky. The crocus-buds wrestle through the carpet of snow, and trees straighten after long months bowed beneath heavy mantles of white. They shake it off and stand proudly in their green robes.

He breathes out and the winter-fog is only a whisper of mist, shining in the pale sun. 

-

“When do you think you’ll be getting on?”

She’s so still, so calm and matter-of-fact and Thorin wants to scream at her. He grits his teeth and sits, with his hands balled into fists that leave red marks against his callused palms.

“I don’t know.” He irons out the quaver in his voice, and she can hear the red-hot betrayal. Asha sighs and takes the seat beside him. She reaches out and finds balled hand. The woman gently straightens the crooked fingers, with a little reluctance. She rubs her fingertips against the crescents in his worn skin and tries to smile. 

“You knew this was coming, Thorin. I did too. You can’t stay, you have people to return to. And I certainly can’t come with you.” There’s a guarded hardness in her voice and Thorin feels himself surging in hatred against it. 

“You always knew.” He stares at the tabletop. “I thought... Perhaps.”

“Nay.” She grips him, firmer. “My place is here, with my babes and my hens and the pig and the people I know.”

“They would like you.” He’s being stupid, he knows it will never work but he feels that for the sake of his own honour, for what he’s lost, for what he’s spat upon, he has to _try_ and salvage some righteousness out of this. “A woman who’s worked with her hands and kept a roof over the head with only her own cunning - they’ll respect that Asha.”

“Don’t delude yourself.” Her barbed tongue whips Thorin’s heart, peeling strips of flesh away. “It was never going to work beyond this. Don’t pretend now that there’s a chance.”

“I don’t understand.” He holds his hands over his face for a moment, afraid that he will literally crack and shatter and there will be pieces of him scattered over the table and floor, for the chickens to scratch through and the pig to slobber over. “If you always knew - then why did you let it happen?”

She squeezes her hand around the empty air where Thorin’s hand was, a moment before. Asha bites the inside of her cheek and stares across the room, thinking for a long time before shifting her gaze to the slumped figure at her elbow. 

“Because I wanted to.” She says simply. “It doesn’t matter if you live for twenty years, or a hundred, or a thousand, Thorin. Life is still too short to let the chances for happiness pass you by.”

-

He dresses in the light of the sunken embers. Boots, vambraces, tunic, trousers, furs, cloak, belt. Some of it he hasn’t worn in a few months, and his hands are clumsy on the buckles. He wishes to leave with the night, let the memory sink with the darkness and a sun breaking over a new dawn. There’s no need for pained, prolonged goodbyes.

But Asha is in the doorway, in her shift. She has that flushed, vibrant look on her face. The two of them had a long night, knowing that it was the last time they would ever be together. 

“Going to leave without saying goodbye?” Her whisper makes him freeze. Thorin turns his head slowly, guilt etched in the deepening lines of his face. 

“I-I’ll write-“

“No you won’t.” Asha pads silently across the room. “You say you will, but you’ll never find the time, and when you do sit down with a quill in your hand, you will realise that you don’t have anything to say.” Her face is hidden in shadow. “No promises to return. No letters. Cut away the dead flesh, Thorin, and let the wound heal.”

Thorin takes in a shaky breath. “I loved you.” He sits down, all booted and furred. He still feels cold. 

“You brought warmth into my home.” Asha remains by the door. “I won’t forget the exiled Dwarf-King who warmed my bed and fed my pig and told stories to my children. Not for as long as I live, although I suppose that means so little to you.” Thorin’s eyes are closed, as though he is enduring a physical blow.

“I would have forsaken everything for you.”

She sighs. “And that is why you have to go.”

He kisses her, one last time. He stands on the tips of his toes, and she bends down, proffering her weather-worn cheek to him. Thorin breathes in for that glorious moment, smelling her skin and hair and the spun linen of her shift. 

-

Dawn breaks as Thorin trudges over the top of the shallow ridge and into the first fold of the mountain pass. There are still the odd patches of snow, here and there, but Thorin knows they will melt in the rising sun and run down the side of the jagged rock in rivulets, joining with the ice-cold stream that bubbles along the bottom of the steep valley and runs through the town. He pauses to bend down and kiss the snow. 

There is a small mercy in his departure. At least, he reasons, nobody will ever know what transpired over the last few months. Nobody would ever suspect Thorin, so stiff and perfect, of infidelity. Because it _was_ infidelity, what he has done with Asha. He was married to that throne, eight decades ago when the lifeless body of his grandfather collapsed to the ground. He was engaged and wedded and consummated all in a single heartbeat. There is no room on his finger, or in his soul, for another. 

He feels no shame in the affair. He will never feel ashamed. Asha was utterly deserving of everything he had to give her and more. If anything, he feels ashamed because he is not ashamed. Thror’s voice roars in his head, demanding guilt, but Thorin can not even pretend that he is sorry. 

He doesn’t look back. 


End file.
